Circuit aware design of power-efficient short range communication systems

We consider the maximization of the overall power efficiency when communicating over a noisy single-input single-output channel while satisfying a certain throughput constraint. The total power dissipation includes the transmit power as well as the analog circuit power consumption. In the context of battery operated short range communication, where low power, low cost and small size are key requirements (e.g. standard IEEE 802.15.4), this circuit aware system optimization is crucial given the growing importance of "Green Communication". In fact, the transmit power in such applications reaches values in the order of or is even smaller than the power dissipation of certain analog components along the signal path. Using an appropriate information-theoretic framework we derive the optimal bit-resolution of the Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), the optimal choice of the noise figure for the low noise amplifier (LNA) and the optimal operating input back-off (IBO) of the Power Amplifier (PA) as a function of the path-loss (i.e. the communication distance). This work is an extension to the work [1], where only the ADC and transmit power have been considered.